[Photo of a black and white tegu lizard (Salvator merianae) by Wagon16 via Flickr & Creative Commons] “Pitch Imperfect” is a series of blog posts where I highlight stories that I pitched but didn’t quite sell and discuss why it was tough to sell them. The goal is to share both interesting research stories and …

[A diabetic supply kit, complete with a knitted pouch that’s shaped like a pancreas. Photo by Erin Stevenson O’Connor via Flickr and Creative Commons.] The box arrived around 5:00 pm. Many of Efsun Arda’s colleagues were already heading home for Thanksgiving, but Arda had work to do. As a post-doc in Seung Kim’s lab at Stanford, …

[Above: Rendering of DNA–aka “what most people think about when they hear ‘molecular identity’”–via ynse on Flickr & Creative Commons. Below: What scientists actually look at when they’re trying to sort out molecular identities. By Micah Baldwin via Flickr & Creative Commons] Two posts and two weeks later, I’ve only covered a fraction of the …

[A hybrid orchid. Photo by Mark Freeth.] [“Molecularization of Identity” Workshop Recap, Part 2] Genomes of indigenous people, which often include genes found nowhere else in the world, can be powerful symbols for nations that want to showcase their uniqueness. But when the Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Medicina Genómica (INMEGEN) set out to find examples …

[Image via the NIH Image Gallery. Photo by Alex Ritter, Jennifer Lippincott Schwartz, and Gillian Griffiths. Full video, complete with narration here.] Under the Radar: A series of listicles about biology concepts you definitely won’t find in newspaper headlines. #1: Be a Navigation App for Immune Cells Natural killer cells, or “NK cells” are the …

[Photo by Tomas Fano via Flickr/Creative Commons] Last August, a paper in Nature debuted with evidence supporting an idea that many suspected but few wanted to hear: If two teams of scientists run the same psychological experiment, the two sets of results end up mismatched. (In fact, when a network of 270 researchers retried 100 …

[“Stockpile” photo by Stephen Edmonds via Flickr/Creative Commons] This week, I’m taking a dollop of my own advice and building a “stockpile” of future posts for this blog. But like blogging itself, building a post stockpile requires a lot of guesswork. The Internet is fickle, and even though I have a pretty good idea of …

(A Highly Subjective Round-up of Standout Science News) [Photo above by Raúl Hernández González via Flickr & Creative Commons] How short is a shortform piece of journalism? Under 250 words? Where does that leave all the pieces clocking in at 500, 700, or 1200 words? Those were the first questions that reared their heads when …

[Photo courtesy of Brian Giesen via Creative Commons & Flickr] “Pitch Imperfect” is a series of blog posts where I highlight stories that I pitched but didn’t quite sell and discuss why it was tough to sell them. The goal is to share both interesting research stories and some of the obstacles in getting them …